Monthly Archives: April 2016

  • Lovely & Amazing

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nicole Holofcener (2001)

    On the evidence of this, her second feature, and Please Give (her fourth), Nicole Holofcener has a set outlook on the world and on human relations – and a narrow illustrative range.  In Lovely & Amazing, as in the later film, she depicts women whose lives pivot on a conflict of neurotic obsessions with looking good and doing good.  Elizabeth Marks (Emily Mortimer) is an actress, anxious that she’s not getting decent roles because she’s not sufficiently sexy.  She also collects and gives a home to stray dogs.  Her fiftyish mother Jane (Brenda Blethyn), out of the socially responsible goodness of her heart, has adopted Annie (Raven Goodwin), an African-American child whose birth mother was a crack addict.  That same heart is also set on liposuction (in more ways than one – Jane foolishly hopes the surgeon might fancy her).  While she’s in hospital for the treatment, the already obese, eight-year-old Annie takes the opportunity to put on make up and have her hair straightened by Lorraine (Aunjanue Ellis), a black ‘Big Sister’ volunteer.  Jane is made to pay for her physical vanity and Elizabeth for both her vanity and her sentimental kindness to animals.  The liposuction goes seriously wrong and Jane’s hospital stay is much longer than the day surgery she expected.  Elizabeth’s latest discovery bites her and she has to have her lip stitched.  As with Please Give, there’s a lot of fractious bitterness in evidence but the score (this time by Craig Richey) supplies a softening leaven. Again it’s Catherine Keener – playing Jane’s eldest daughter Michelle (an out-of-paid-work artist) – who provides human complexity of a more substantial kind.

    In Please Give the men’s parts were few and minor.  The only sizeable one was the protagonist’s flabby, unfaithful husband and Holofcener’s attitude towards him seemed more contemptuous than hostile.  She shows herself more of a misandrist in Lovely & Amazing.   It seems that the only way a man can be tolerable is if he’s almost comically innocuous – like the teenager Jordan (Jake Gyllenhaal), from the one-hour photo shop which Michelle is reduced to working in; or not as appalling as his character type would lead you to think – like the sex-machine egotistical actor Kevin (Dermot Mulroney).  Elizabeth does a reading with Kevin to test their ‘chemistry’ for a TV series.  After she’s failed the test, he starts a relationship with her.  (It’s striking that when Holofcener takes a negative female stereotype that’s how she stays – Elizabeth’s imperturbably insincere agent (Christine Mourad) is an example here.)  If a man is a more or less conventional husband or boyfriend, he’s liable to be a shitty bore:  Michelle’s husband (Clark Gregg) won’t have sex any more and is two-timing her; Elizabeth’s boyfriend (James Le Gros) is a humourless scientist and a deadening belittler.  The best a male can be is disappointing.  At the end of the film, when Jane is ready to come home, all three main characters do without the men who’d looked promising.  Michelle, after a late-night meeting with Jordan in her car, has been arrested for statutory rape of a minor (although we assume charges won’t be pressed).  Kevin invites Elizabeth over to his swimming pool but she decides she can do without him.  The liposuction surgeon (Michael Nouri) was happily married.

    I enjoyed Lovely & Amazing more than Please Give.  One reason for that is negative:  the new movie, which I’d looked forward to seeing, left a rather dismal residue.  I was primed to be lowered by this film too – and consequently wasn’t.   There were also positive reasons, though.  In spite of the tensions in their relationships, Jane, Michelle, Elizabeth and Annie are fond of each other – there’s a sense of the resilience of family as well as sisterhood here.   The main positive is the cast.  Nicole Holofcener seems excessively dependent on the charm and talent of performers to give substance and nuances to the roles she writes but she casts shrewdly and she directs actors well.   Keener is the emotional centre of the film but she’s well supported by Brenda Blethyn and Emily Mortimer.  Jane’s anaesthetic seems to have curbed Blethyn’s enthusiasm for overdoing her characters – both she and Keener are experts in delivering sotto voce expletives.  Mortimer just about manages to prevent Elizabeth’s kookiness from grating on your nerves.  I could rarely make out what Raven Goodwin as Annie was saying but this little girl has an odd, imposing presence – she seems spiritually years older than Elizabeth (or even Jane).  Jake Gyllenhaal and Dermot Mulroney enrich the film hugely.  Mulroney manages with great skill and humour the sequence (difficult for both actors) in which the naked Elizabeth asks Kevin to appraise her:  while very experienced in seeing naked women, he increasingly enjoys the novelty of delivering a critical analysis of what he sees.  The twenty-one-year-old Gyllenhaal (Lovely & Amazing was released just a few weeks before Donnie Darko) is believable as a teenager and empathetic with the character of Jordan:  he lights up the screen immediately and the film is re-animated each time he reappears.

    26 August 2010

  • Lovelace

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (2013)

    The directors made their name as makers of documentaries and perhaps they should revert to them.  They’ve chosen interesting subjects for their dramatic biopics and unusual structures for telling the subjects’ stories – it’s understandable that Epstein and Friedman were excited by the idea of these structures but they don’t translate to the screen.  I enjoyed Howl in the cinema but it seemed much weaker when I watched it again on television, with the way it was put together now deprived of its novelty value.   (I was also conscious from early on that Sally didn’t rate Howl:  whenever I’ve seen something on my own and liked it, and we then watch it together on my recommendation, I feel responsible for the film and am hyper-aware of everything wrong with it.)   In Lovelace, Epstein and Friedman, working from a screenplay by Andy Bellin, tell the story of Linda Lovelace in two parts.  The first describes how Linda Boreman became the star of Deep Throat, probably the best-known and commercially the most successful porn film ever made.  This working-class girl in her early twenties wants to have more fun than her Catholic parents are ready to allow but she has no ambition to star in blue movies.  It’s her husband Chuck Traynor, a minnow in the East Coast porn industry, who wants to use Linda so that he can become a big fish.  The second part of the movie is framed by Linda’s taking a polygraph test so that a prospective publisher can decide whether Ordeal, the autobiography that she’s written, is true.  Epstein and Friedman show what was going on behind the scenes as Deep Throat became a phenomenon.  This consists chiefly of showing how Traynor bullied and physically beat Linda.  As I watched the first half of Lovelace, I thought it was to the directors’ credit that they weren’t harshly judgmental of the porn film-makers.  Once you see the second half, you wonder if this generosity isn’t designed to ensure that Chuck Traynor is unchallenged as the exploitative villain of the piece.

    If so, Epstein and Friedman needn’t have bothered because Peter Sarsgaard as Chuck dominates the movie anyway (which seems wrong in itself).  Epstein and Friedman may have been taken by the idea that Linda Lovelace didn’t want to be a porn star and so defies the biopic convention whereby the protagonist is determined to make it at all costs.  If the Wikipedia article on her is anything like accurate it seems that Epstein, Friedman and Andy Bellin have exaggerated Linda’s innocence and the brevity of her career in porn but a much bigger problem with their take on Linda is its effect on Lovelace as a drama.  Making the heroine entirely unassuming and obedient puts huge pressure on Amanda Seyfried, who plays her.  Because she doesn’t choose to become a dirty movie star and you have no sense of what Linda would rather be, Seyfried has no opportunity to express motivation.   And because she’s being used both by her husband and by an industry that’s inherently exploitative there’s no essential difference between the two tellings of her story, only a change of tone on the part of the directors.  (I can’t believe that, if they’d made a documentary about Linda Lovelace, they would have limited Linda in this way.)  The four movies I’ve so far seen Amanda Seyfried in amount to an odd polarity of her roles:  I suppose the Linda of Lovelace could be seen as an ingénue to follow the ones she played in Mamma Mia! and Les Misérables but the decidedly sexualised context aligns it more with her character in Chloe.   The only strength evident in those other performances was Seyfried’s remarkably sweet singing voice.  In spite of the crippling constraints placed on her by the film-makers’ conception of Linda, she suggests in Lovelace much more potential as an actress.

    Epstein and Friedman have got together a very talented cast.  Sharon Stone overplays Linda’s bitterly reproachful mother and Robert Patrick, to a lesser extent, her father but Juno Temple is good as her Florida friend Patsy.  (The Boremans moved from New York to start a new life in Florida after Linda, at the age of nineteen, had given birth to a child she wasn’t allowed to keep.)     Wes Bentley has a nice cameo as a sympathetic photographer (Amanda Seyfried is excellent in her scene with him).  Chloë Sevigny appears momentarily (it literally is a single shot) as an interviewer.  James Franco doesn’t do much with Hugh Hefner but on the film set Adam Brody is witty as Linda’s co-star Harry Reems (his bad acting is just right).  Both Hank Azaria and Bobby Cannavale supply tangy caricatures as, respectively, the director and one of the financial backers of Deep Throat.  But the grungy relish of their turns is incongruous in the second half of Lovelace and Azaria and Cannevale’s characters virtually disappear from it.  Peter Sarsgaard is problematic in a different way.  He’s such a strong and truthful actor that he makes Chuck deeply creepy from the start.  The man’s darker side is no surprise (this is the fault of the undernourished script, not the actor).  When he comes to the Boremans’ house for dinner for the first time and puts on an ingratiating act for the benefit of Linda’s parents, it makes for an amusing scene but this is partly because Chuck is so evidently disreputable.  It’s incredible that Linda’s mother is taken in by someone as transparently louche as Sarsgaard’s Chuck.  He’s one of those men who, when he makes a rare attempt to look neat and tidy, comes over as even more shifty and clammy.

    2 September 2013